Friday, April 17, 2015

Dear President Obama, Senators, and Members of Congress:Americans now owe $1.3 trillion in student debt. Eighty-six percent of
that money is owed to the United States government. This is a crushing
burden for more than 40 million Americans and their families.

I urge you to take immediate action to forgive all student debt, public and private.

The
Local 10 Executive Board voted to pass the motion below with the
amendment that we shutdown the port on May Day and march on City Hall to
demand an end to police killings. We need to march and speak out for
Mumia and his critical situation also. We'll try to organize a rally at
City Hall. There's a possibility of predominantly Black longshore unions
in the South joining us.

Union Action to Stop Police
Killings of Black and Brown People

Whereas, police are continuing to kill unarmed Black and Brown people across this country, and

Whereas, ILWU shuts down all West Coast ports on Bloody
Thursday to remember the killing of two strikers shot in the back by police in
the Big Strike of 1934, and

Whereas, ILWU has a proud history of standing up against
racial injustice like the 1984 anti-apartheid action and the 2010 shut down for
justice for Oscar Grant, and

Whereas, our brothers and sisters in ILA Local 1422 of
Charleston, South Carolina have been organizing protests against the recent
killing of unarmed Walter Scott shot in the back by police,

Therefore Be It Resolved that if our brothers and sisters of
ILA 1422, home of the Charleston 5 struggle of which Local 10 was in the
forefront, call on us to join with them now in a protest against police
brutality we will stand with them in solidarity.

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

Save the Date - UNAC National Conference, May 8 - 10, 2015

UNAC
is the major national antiwar coalition in the U.S. today. The
existence of a United National Antiwar Coalition is vital and we need
your financial support to continue our work and to expand.

With
U.S. wars today accelerating and expanding globally in various forms –
from drone attacks on Yemen and Pakistan, never-ending wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, support to neo-fascists in Ukraine, and proliferating
Africom forces to threats of war for regime change in Syria – we have an
obligation to do whatever is possible to educate the public and to take
action to stop the carnage.

The wars abroad are
connected to global warming with most wars fought over energy resources
with the U.S. war machine as the largest polluter.

At
home, we see hugely growing income inequality, a militarized and racist
police force, mass incarceration of Blacks and Latinos, and a massive
police state apparatus that includes global surveillance and laws to
quell dissent.

In spite of the trillions spent by the
U.S. corporate war government and its controlled media propaganda
machine to keep us in check, the people are fighting back. We’ve been
inspired and strengthened by the hundreds of thousands of new activists
taking to the streets of this country to stop police brutality, to build
Occupy encampments, to fight for decent wages, to demand full rights
for immigrants, to win marriage equality, to end global warming, to
demonstrate solidarity with the besieged people of Gaza, and to protest
unending U.S. wars.

UNAC has played an active, often
leadership role, in all of the antiwar and social justice movements of
our time. While most activists are focused on their particular issues,
the most vital role we can play is to connect the issues to their
source. All of the injustices and crimes we protest, stem from the
imperialist insatiable drive for expanding profit and control – and the
U.S. is the largest imperialist power militarily and economically. When
there should be plenty for all, only the obscenely wealthy benefit
while the rest of the 99% struggle just to survive.

Some of our recent major accomplishments:
· Initiated protest against NATO and 15,000 marched in Chicago in 2012.
·
Called for immediate actions against threats of war and coups directed
at Libya, Iran, No. Korea, Africa, Latin America, Ukraine, and
maintaining the U.S. presence in Iraq and Afghanistan.
· Organized a national tour for Afghan leader Malalai Joya.
· Sent representatives to international NATO protests and conferences.
·
Serve on the Board of the National Coalition to Protect Civil Freedoms
to act against Islamophobia , racist attacks on Muslims, and attacks on
our civil liberties.
· Participated in national efforts to organize anti-drone actions.
·
Campaigned to defend victims of government repression who speak out and
expose Washington’s crimes, including Rasmea Odeh, Mumia abu Jamal,
Lynne Stewart, Chelsea Manning, and the Midwest activists targeted by
the FBI.
· Produced national educational conference calls
featuring experts on topics such as U.S. intervention in Africa, the
destruction of Libya, the developing wars in Syria, and others.
·
Built an antiwar contingent in the massive New York City Climate Change
march and built Climate Change action in other cities around the
country.
· Helped organize protests against Israel’s attack on Gaza
·
Helped organize protests against the murder of Blacks by white police
and the militarization of the police forces in the U.S.

UNAC
has a history of bringing hundreds of activists together at large
national conferences to learn about the issues of the day, to discuss
the way forward and to vote on an Action Program for the coming period.

The
UNAC conference next May will bring activists from all the movements in
motion to cross-fertilize these struggles. We are particularly
dedicated to bringing young activists together to support and learn from
each other. For this, we need your help to offer subsidies to leaders
from Ferguson, from the border wars in the southwest, from the Native
Americans who are fighting against the pipelines ruining their lands,
from the Students for Justice in Palestine, and many others.

Please give generously so that we can continue our work to bring harmony and justice to the peoples of this earth.

You
can send a check to UNAC at PO Box 123, Delmar, NY 12054 or click the
button below to contribute on-line with your credit or debit card.

https://www.unacpeace.org/

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

Here’s an update for you from the ‘Mumia Abu-Jamal Needs Medical Care NOW!’ team:

We
are keeping our “Eyes on Mumia”. Your support has enabled his family
see him. On Thursday Mumia's wife Wadiya Jamal visited him. She shared
with us that his weakened state continues, and she is deeply concerned
that he still has not had the appropriate care and diagnosis-- and in
fact has been returned to the environment that allowed his chronic but
treatable conditions to nearly kill him.

We demand that:

1)
Mumia’s chosen private physician has immediate regular phone access to
Mumia in the infirmary. Phone access is limited in the infirmary, and
Mumia and his physician need to be in conversation throughout each week.

2)
His doctor be allowed to communicate freely and regularly with the
prison infirmary physicians who are currently overseeing Mumia’s care.

3)
The PA Department of Corrections (DOC) allow Mumia’s doctor to schedule
animmediate Independent Medical Examination in an examination room with
a table and medical instruments.

4) The PA DOC develop
a diagnostic and treatment plan adequate to understand any underlying
conditions that have contributed to his current ongoing crisis, and that
consultation with appropriate specialists be arranged in a timely
fashion and be used to assist in this effort. We need a mass
mobilization of calls and letters to:

On
Saturday from his wheelchair in the visiting room, Mumia discussed the
steps necessary that both he and his outside doctors and supporters have
to take for him get the care he needs. His attorney, Bret Grote of the
Abolitionist Law Center, discussed the ongoing efforts to pursue
immediate diagnosis and adequate treatment for his medical conditions.

On
Monday Mumia met with Suzanne Ross, again in a wheelchair, in the
visiting room and only for an hour to preserve his strength. She noted
that although he remained very sick, his mind was sharp and focused.

Please know that it is your calls, faxes, emails, and letters that have literally kept Mumia with us.

The
next few weeks are crucial to making sure that he receives appropriate
care. Pleasecontinue calling. Continuing rising up. Stay involved.

Prisoners and Advocacy Groups Win Right to a Trial On Constitutionality of the Silencing Act (PA SB508)

This
morning, Chief Judge for the federal court in the Middle District of
Pennsylvania, Christopher Conner, will hear the cases Abu-Jamal v. Kane
and Prison Legal News v. Kane in a trial that willl determine the
constitutionality of PA SB508 "the Silencing Act". Defendant PA
Attorney General Kane will be hard pressed to argue the
constitutionality of the Silencing Act, a censorship law targeted at
Mumia Abu-Jamal and other currently and formerly incarcerated people.

Defendant
Seth Williams was dismissed from the case based on his explicit
disavowal of enforcing the act until a court of competent jurisdiction
rules on the constitutionality of the statute. His dismissal does not
hinder Plaintiffs ability to obtain the relief of invalidating this law,
as a favorable ruling on the First Amendment issue against Defendant
Kane will achieve the same result. Williams' disavowal of enforcement is
a far cry from his political grandstanding in support of this bill's
passage in the fall.

The judge has ordered that this trial will
include Plaintiffs' motion for preliminary injunction merged with a
trial on the merits, meaning that if we win we will be granted a
permanent injunction against the statute, and the statue will be
invalidated.

“Silencing prisoners is one more way of
dehumanizing them,” said Amistad Law Project Policy Director Nikki
Grant. “We need the voices of the marginalized to shed light on
injustice.”

The trial is set for this morning March 30 in
Harrisburg, PA approximately 5 months since former Governor Corbett
signed this ill-fated bill into law.

The Abolitionist Law
Center, Amistad Law Project, and the Roderick and Solange MacArthur
Justice Center at Northwestern University School of Law filed the
lawsuit on Nov. 10th to stop enforcement of the law. The law firms
represent Mumia Abu-Jamal, Prison Radio, Educators for Mumia Abu-Jamal,
Kerry “Shakaboona” Marshall, Robert L. Holbrook, Donnell Palmer, Anthony
Chance, and Human Rights Coalition.

The Silencing Act, also
known as 18 P.S. § 11.1304, allows the Attorney General, county District
Attorneys, and victims of personal injury crimes to bring a lawsuit in
civil court against the person convicted of the personal injury crime to
enjoin conduct that “perpetuates the continuing effect of the crime on
the victim”. The actions that could prompt a lawsuit include “conduct
which causes a temporary or permanent state of mental anguish.”

“This
law is unconstitutional,” said David Shapiro of MacArthur Justice
Center. “The facts are on our side and the law is on our side. The
Silencing Act targets a huge amount of constitutionally protected speech
based on who is speaking.”

After a prerecorded commencement
speech by journalist and prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal was played for
graduates at Goddard College in Vermont, the Pennsylvania legislature
passed and outgoing Governor Corbett signed into law the Silencing Act
on October 21st, 16 days after the commencement speech.

Abu-Jamal
has spent 33 years in prison, 29 of which were in solitary confinement
on death row after being convicted at a 1982 trial that Amnesty
International said “failed to meet minimum international standards
safeguarding the fairness of legal proceedings.”

Robert L.
Holbrook, who is serving a death by incarceration, life without parole,
sentence he received as a child, had this to say about the law: “there
are people in prison who will stop writing, stop publishing, stop
speaking out because of this law.”

Amistad Law Project is a West Philadelphia-based public interest law center.
Our mission is to fight for the human rights of all people by providing
legal services to people incarcerated in Pennsylvania’s prisons.
www.amistadlaw.org | @amistadlaw | 267-225-5884

The
Abolitionist Law Center is a public interest law firm inspired by the
struggle of political and politicized prisoners, and organized for the
purpose of abolishing class and race based mass incarceration in the
United States. 412-654-9070

Prison Radio has recorded Mumia
and other political prisoners for over 25 years, and we are pulling out
all the stops to keep these voices on the air. 415-706-5222

Donate Now
to fight the “gag” law!
go to:
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/protect-freedom-of-speech-keep-mumia-on-the-air

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

Support Prison Radio

$35 is the yearly membership.

$50 will get you a beautiful tote bag (you can special order a yoga mat bag, just call us).

$100 will get the DVD "Mumia: Long Distance Revolutionary"

$300 will bring one essay to the airwaves.

$1000 (or $88.83 per month) will make you a member of our Prison Radio Freedom Circle. Take a moment and Support Prison Radio

Luchando por la justicia y la libertad,

Noelle Hanrahan, Director, Prison Radio

PRISON RADIO

P.O. Box 411074 San Francisco, CA 94141

www.prisonradio.org
info@prisonradio.org 415-706-5222

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

Campaign to Free Lorenzo Johnson

Lorenzo Speaks Concerning Prosecution's Brief:
JANUARY
1, 2015—The prosecutor has run away from (almost) every issue raised in
my PCRA by begging the Court to dismiss everything as “untimely”. When
they don’t do this, they suggest that me and my lawyers were
“defamatory” towards either my former prosecutor Christopher Abruzzo or
Detective Kevin Duffin, in our claims they withheld, misused or hid
evidence of my Innocence, in order to secure an unjust conviction in
this case. If I charged, a year ago, that about a dozen AGs (attorneys
general) were involved in circulating porno via their office computers,
people would’ve laughed at me, and seen me as crazy.

But,
guess what? During 2014, we learned that this was the truth. How can it
be defamatory to speak the truth? Notice the OAG (Office of Attorney
General), never said the obvious: That AG Abruzzo didn’t inform the
Defense about the relationship between his Motive Witness and his head
detective (Victoria Doubs and Det. Duffin); that Det. Duffin doesn’t
deny Doubs was his god-sister, and that she lived in his family home, or
that he assisted her whenever she got into trouble.

Why
not? Because it is true. How can you defame someone who defames
himself? Mr. Christopher Abruzzo, Esq., when a member of the higher
ranks of the OAG, sent and/or received copious amounts of porno to other
attorneys general and beyond. What does this say about his sense of
judgment? He thought enough about his behavior to resign from his post
in the Governor’s Cabinet. If he thought that his behavior was okay,
he’d still be sitting in the Governor’s cabinet, right? The OAG cannot
honestly oppose anything we’ve argued, but they try by seeking to get
the Court to do their dirty work, how? By denying an Evidentiary Hearing
to prove every point we’ve claimed.

The prosecution is
trying desperately to avoid dealing with the substance of my claims in
Com. v. Lorenzo Johnson. So, they slander my Legal Team and blame them
for defaming the good AG’s and Cops involved with this case. They try to
do what is undeniable, to deny that they hid evidence from the Defense
for years. They blamed me for daring to protest the hidden evidence of
their malfeasance and other acts to sabotage the defense. They claim
that they had an “Open File” policy with my trial counsel. But “Open
File” is more than letting an attorney read something in their office.
If it’s a search for the truth it must include what is turned over to
the attorney, for how do we really know what was shown to her?

They
say it is inconceivable that an attorney would read a file, beginning
on page nine (9), and not ask for the preceding eight (8) pages. Yet, it
is conceivable if trial counsel was ineffective for not demanding the
record of the first eight pages. Pages that identify the State’s only
witness as a “SUSPECT” in the murder for which her client was charged!
How could such an attorney fail to recognize the relevance of such an
issue, barring their sheer Ineffectiveness and frankly, Incompetence.

By
seeking to avoid an evidentiary hearing, the prosecution seeks to avoid
evidence of their wrongdoing being made plain, for all to see. If they
believe I’m wrong, why not prove it? They can’t. So they shout I filed
my appeal untimely, as if there can ever justly be a rule that precludes
an innocent from proving his innocence! Not to mention the fact that
the prosecution has failed to even mention the positive finger prints
that ay my trial they said none existed. Don’t try to hide it with a
lame argument about time. When isn’t there a time for truth? The
prosecution should be ashamed of itself for taking this road. It is
unworthy of an office that claims to seek justice.

After
the trial verdict The Patriot-News (March 18, 1997) reported, “Deputy
Attorney General Christopher Abruzzo admitted there were some serious
concerns about the strength of the evidence against Johnson and praised
the jury for doing a thorough job.” I guess he forgot to mention all of
the evidence he left out to show Innocence.

Now, more than ever, Lorenzo Johnson needs your support.
Publicize his case; bring it to your friends, clubs, religious
and social organizations.

On
December 15, 2014 the Rev. Edward Pinkney of Benton Harbor, Michigan
was thrown into prison for 2.5 to 10 years. This 66-year-old leading
African American activist was tried and convicted in front of an
all-white jury and racist white judge and prosecutor for supposedly
altering 5 dates on a recall petition against the mayor of Benton
Harbor.

The prosecutor, with the judge’s approval, repeatedly
told the jury “you don’t need evidence to convict Mr. Pinkney.” And
ABSOLUTELY NO EVIDENCE WAS EVER PRESENTED THAT TIED REV. PINKNEY TO THE
‘ALTERED’ PETITIONS. Rev. Pinkney was immediately led away in handcuffs
and thrown into Jackson Prison.

This is an outrageous charge. It is an outrageous conviction. It is an even more outrageous sentence! It must be appealed.

With your help supporters need to raise $20,000 for Rev. Pinkney’s appeal.

Checks
can be made out to BANCO (Black Autonomy Network Community
Organization). This is the organization founded by Rev. Pinkney. Mail
them to: Mrs. Dorothy Pinkney, 1940 Union Street, Benton Harbor, MI
49022.

Donations can be accepted on-line at bhbanco.org – press the donate button.

For information on the decade long campaign to destroy Rev. Pinkney go to bhbanco.org and workers.org(search “Pinkney”).

We urge your support to the efforts to Free Rev. Pinkney!Ramsey Clark – Former U.S. attorney general,Cynthia McKinney – Former member of U.S. Congress,Lynne Stewart – Former political prisoner and human rights attorneyRalph Poynter – New Abolitionist Movement,Abayomi Azikiwe – Editor, Pan-African News Wire<Larry Holmes – Peoples Power Assembly,David Sole – Michigan Emergency Committee Against War & InjusticeSara Flounders – International Action Center

MESSAGE FROM REV. PINKNEY

I
am now in Marquette prison over 15 hours from wife and family, sitting
in prison for a crime that was never committed. Judge Schrock and Mike
Sepic both admitted there was no evidence against me but now I sit in
prison facing 30 months. Schrock actually stated that he wanted to make
an example out of me. (to scare Benton Harbor residents even more...)
ONLY IN AMERICA. I now have an army to help fight Berrien County. When I
arrived at Jackson state prison on Dec. 15, I met several hundred
people from Detroit, Flint, Kalamazoo, and Grand Rapids. Some people
recognized me. There was an outstanding amount of support given by the
prison inmates. When I was transported to Marquette Prison it took 2
days. The prisoners knew who I was. One of the guards looked me up on
the internet and said, "who would believe Berrien County is this
racist."

New Court Date on 4 Motions for Rev. Pinkney

TUES, FEB. 24 1pm Berrien County Court

Background to Campaign to free Rev. Pinkney

Michigan
political prisoner the Rev. Edward Pinkney is a victim of racist
injustice. He was sentenced to 30 months to 10 years for supposedly
changing the dates on 5 signatures on a petition to recall Benton Harbor
Mayor James Hightower.

No material or circumstantial evidence
was presented at the trial that would implicate Pinkney in the
purported5 felonies. Many believe that Pinkney, a Berrien County
activist and leader of the Black Autonomy Network Community Organization
(BANCO), is being punished by local authorities for opposing the
corporate plans of Whirlpool Corp, headquartered in Benton Harbor,
Michigan.

In 2012, Pinkney and BANCO led an “Occupy the PGA
[Professional Golfers’ Association of America]” demonstration against a
world-renowned golf tournament held at the newly created Jack Nicklaus
Signature Golf Course on the shoreline of Lake Michigan. The course was
carved out of Jean Klock Park, which had been donated to the city of
Benton Harbor decades ago.

Berrien County officials were
determined to defeat the recall campaign against Mayor Hightower, who
opposed a program that would have taxed local corporations in order to
create jobs and improve conditions in Benton Harbor, a majority
African-American municipality. Like other Michigan cities, it has been
devastated by widespread poverty and unemployment.

The Benton
Harbor corporate power structure has used similar fraudulent charges to
stop past efforts to recall or vote out of office the racist white
officials, from mayor, judges, prosecutors in a majority Black city. Rev
Pinkney who always quotes scripture, as many Christian ministers do,
was even convicted for quoting scripture in a newspaper column. This
outrageous conviction was overturned on appeal. We must do this again!

To sign the petition in support of the Rev. Edward Pinkney, log on to: tinyurl.com/ps4lwyn.

President Obama has delegated review of Chelsea Manning’s clemency appeal to individuals within the Department of Defense. Please write them to express your support for heroic
WikiLeaks’ whistle-blower former US Army intelligence analyst PFC
Chelsea Manning’s release from military prison.
It is important that each of these authorities realize the wide
support that Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning enjoys worldwide. They
need to be reminded that millions understand that Manning is a political
prisoner, imprisoned for following her conscience. While it is highly
unlikely that any of these individuals would independently move to
release Manning, a reduction in Manning’s outrageous 35-year prison
sentence is a possibility at this stage.Take action TODAY – Write letters supporting Chelsea’s clemency petition to the following DoD authorities:Secretary of the Army John McHugh

101 Army Pentagon
Washington, DC 20310-0101

The Judge Advocate General
2200 Army Pentagon
Washington, DC 20310-2200

The letter should focus on your support for Chelsea Manning, and
especially why you believe justice will be served if Chelsea Manning’s
sentence is reduced. The letter should NOT be anti-military as this will be unlikely to help

A suggested message: “Chelsea Manning has been
punished enough for violating military regulations in the course of
being true to her conscience. I urge you to use your authorityto reduce
Pvt. Manning’s sentence to time served.” Beyond that general message,
feel free to personalize the details as to why you believe Chelsea
deserves clemency.

Consider composing your letter on personalized letterhead -you can create this yourself (here are templates and some tips for doing that).

A comment on this post will NOT be seen by DoD authorities–please send your letters to the addresses above

This clemency petition is separate from Chelsea Manning’s upcoming
appeal before the US Army Court of Criminal Appeals next year, where
Manning’s new attorney Nancy Hollander will have an opportunity to
highlight the prosecution’s—and the trial judge’s—misconduct during last
year’s trial at Ft. Meade, Maryland.

Help us continue to cover 100% of Chelsea’s legal fees at this critical stage!

A
home health care worker in Durham, N.C.; a McDonald’s cashier in
Chicago; a bank teller in New York; an adjunct professor in Mayfield,
Ill. They are all evidence of an improving economy, because they are
working and not among the steadily declining ranks of the unemployed.

Yet these same people also are on public assistance — relying on food stamps, Medicaid or other stretches of the safety net to help cover basic expenses when their paychecks come up short.

And
they are not alone. Nearly three-quarters of the people helped by
programs geared to the poor are members of a family headed by a worker,
according to a new study by the Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education
at the University of California. As a result, taxpayers are providing
not only support to the poor but also, in effect, a huge subsidy for
employers of low-wage workers, from giants like McDonald’s and Walmart
to mom-and-pop businesses.“This is a hidden cost of low-wage work,” said
Ken Jacobs, chairman of the Berkeley center and a co-author of the
report, which is scheduled for release on Monday.

Taxpayers pick
up the difference, he said, between what employers pay and what is
required to cover what most Americans consider essential living costs.

The
report estimates that state and federal governments spend more than
$150 billion a year on four key antipoverty programs used by working
families: Medicaid,
Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, food stamps and the
earned-income tax credit, which is specifically aimed at working
families.

This disparity has helped propel the movement to raise
the minimum wage and prompted efforts in a handful of states to recover
public funds from employers of low-wage workers. In Connecticut, for
example, a legislative proposal calls for large employers to pay a fee
to the state for each worker who earns less than $15 an hour. In 2016,
California will start publishing the names of employers that have more
than 100 employees receiving Medicaid, and how much these companies cost
the state in public assistance.

“The low-wage business model
practiced by many of the largest and most profitable employers in the
country not only leaves many working families unable to afford the
basics, but also imposes significant costs on the public as a whole,”
Sarah Leberstein, a senior staff lawyer with the National Employment Law
Project, testified recently before Connecticut lawmakers.

Other
states, as well as several cities, including Washington, D.C., have
moved to raise the minimum wage above $10, while local activists in fast
food, retailing, home care, airport services and other low-wage
industries have organized protests to demand $15 an hour. Organizers of
the Fight for 15 movement are planning a nationwide wave of protests and strikes for this Wednesday — April 15.

Adriana
Alvarez, a cashier at a McDonald’s in Chicago, is among the people
pushing for higher wages. After five years with the fast-food giant, Ms.
Alvarez, 22, earns $10.50 an hour, well above the federal minimum wage
of $7.25. Still, she depends on food stamps, Medicaid and a child-care
subsidy to help get through the week.

“He eats a lot,” Ms.
Alvarez said of her 3-year-old son, Manny, with a laugh. He also drinks a
lot of milk, she said — “a half-gallon every two days” — and because he
is lactose intolerant, he requires a more expensive brand, using up
most of her $80 allotment of food stamps.

Most everyone else she
works with — including many 10-year-plus veterans of the franchise —
receives food stamps, said Ms. Alvarez, who started working at
McDonald’s full time when she was in high school.

She depends on
Medicaid for her family’s health care, and receives a subsidy for the
day care center where she drops off Manny on her way to work.

With
the recovery now well into its sixth year, stagnant wages have
increasingly become the central economic issue and a political flash
point.

A report issued last week
by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland said that labor’s share of
overall income had fallen to record lows in recent years while profits
have soared.

A handful of powerhouse companies have cited a
tightening labor market as the reason behind recent wage increases,
including McDonald’s, which recently announced a $1 bump
over the local legal minimum for its corporate employees. (The
announcement does not apply to the vast majority of McDonald’s
employees, who work in franchises.)

Several economists, including the Nobel Prize winner Joseph E. Stiglitz,
who has written extensively on inequality, credited political rather
than competitive pressures for the decision by some larger fast-food and
retail employers to raise wages.

William E. Spriggs, chief
economist at the A.F.L.-C.I.O., said the McDonald’s announcement was “a
response to worker campaigns to increase the minimum wage and what is
going on in legislatures on the state and local levels.”

Denise
Rush, a home health care worker in Durham, N.C., often works seven days a
week, returning home near midnight after her two teenagers have already
gone to bed. At $9.50 an hour, her biweekly paycheck totals just over
$700, or the cost of her monthly rent. There is little left for other
expenses.

“It’s a crazy dilemma,” she said. “Do I pay the whole bill or do I gas up the car to go to work?”

Despite
receiving coverage for her children’s health care from Medicaid as well
as about $300 a month in food stamps, Ms. Rush, 41, is still
struggling. “We’re talking about basic needs,” she said, including such
staples of modern life as a cellphone to keep in touch with work and her
children and a home Internet connection to allow her children to do
their homework.

Her paycheck also fails to pay for the uniforms
and fees for the lacrosse, basketball and soccer teams that Ms. Rush
says she believes are essential to keep her son and daughter occupied
and out of trouble while she is working. Fortunately, she said, the
school has helped pick up that tab.

About 48 percent of home
health care workers are on public assistance, the Berkeley researchers
found. So are 46 percent of child care workers and 52 percent of
fast-food workers.

Even some of the nation’s best-educated
workers have turned to taxpayers for support; a quarter of the families
of part-time college faculty members are on public assistance, the
Berkeley researchers found.

“I’m very proud of my doctorate, it
was well-earned, but in terms of the work force, it’s a penalty,” said
Wanda Brewer, who lives in Mayfield, a Chicago suburb, and teaches at
DeVry and Concordia colleges. She is paid $2,700 for each 15-week course
she teaches. She and her 4-year-old daughter are both on Medicaid; they
also receive $390 a month in food stamps and a child care subsidy.

She
has applied for other jobs at chains like Walmart, Home Depot and
Menard’s, but says she can’t even get a call back because such employers
consider her overqualified.

“When I apply for anything outside
education, they laugh at me,” Ms. Brewer said. “The term professor
immediately commands respect. The assumption is you’re making a fair
wage, a living wage, but that is not necessarily so.”

ATLANTA
— Atlanta educators convicted of racketeering in a huge public school
cheating scandal who rejected a sentencing deal received prison time
during proceedings on Tuesday in a Fulton County court.

One
educator who took a sentencing deal negotiated overnight, Donald
Bullock, a testing coordinator, was ordered to spend six months of
weekends in county jail and five years on probation. He was also fined
$5,000 and ordered to do 1,500 hours of community service.

Among
those declining deals were three higher-level administrators, Sharon
Davis-Williams, Michael Pitts and Tamara Cotman, all regional directors
at Atlanta Public Schools. An irate Judge Jerry W. Baxter of Fulton
County Superior Court sentenced each of them to 20 years, with seven to
be served in prison, and the remainder on probation. Each must also pay a
$25,000 file and perform 2,000 hours of community service.

The
sentences had been expected on Monday, but after spending most of the
day listing to character witnesses — friends and family members — plead
for leniency for the educators, Judge Baxter asked prosecutors and
defense lawyers to try work out sentencing deals. The judge ordered them
back into court Tuesday morning.

A principal, Dana Evans, who
also declined a deal, received a five-year sentence — a year in prison
and four years probation — and must do 1,000 hours of community service.

The punishments for the other educators are expected to be determined later Tuesday.

The
atmosphere in the downtown Atlanta courtroom was highly charged Tuesday
morning. In one exchange over the status of appellate bonds, Judge
Baxter threatened to put a lawyer in jail if he did not quiet down.

The
judge grimaced and bellowed throughout the proceedings, apparently
piqued that some of the defendants have declined to take deals. Notably,
the sentencing arrangements would have forced the educators to
acknowledge their guilt. By refusing the deals, they are able appeal
their convictions.

“I think there were hundreds, thousands of
children who were harmed in this city,” the judge said. “That’s what
gets lost. Everybody starts crying about these educators. There were
thousands of students who were harmed by this thing. This was not a
victimless crime in this city.”

The educators had been convicted of racketeering,
a charge more typically associated with traditional organized crime
rings. Prosecutors said they had participated in a wide-ranging
conspiracy to artificially inflate student standardized test scores and
give a false sense that struggling schools were improving. The motive,
the prosecutors said, was to protect their jobs or win bonuses or favor
from their superiors.

Prosecutors maintained that some of the
most vulnerable students in the struggling system were victims of the
scheme, with the false accomplishments ascribed to them obscuring the
fact that they actually needed extra help.

A
state investigation completed in 2011 found that nearly 180 school
system employees were complicit, in some cases gathering at cheating
parties to erase incorrect test answers and fill in the correct ones. A
Fulton County grand jury later indicted 35 educators,
including the former schools superintendent Beverly L. Hall, who had
previously been celebrated for her data-driven management style and the
gains she appeared to have made at the school system.

That
left a dozen educators who put their fates in the hands of a Fulton
County jury. Each defendant faced up to 20 years in prison for the
racketeering charge, and some faced other charges, including making
false statements.

They were tried together in an often ungainly
trial that dragged on for six months and ended April 1, when the jury
returned its verdict. One defendant, Dessa Curb, a former elementary
schoolteacher, was acquitted. Another former elementary schoolteacher,
Shani Robinson, was found guilty, but she delivered a baby over the
weekend, according to news reports, and will be sentenced later.

The
sentences expected to be handed down to the other 10 defendants are
likely to serve as a somber coda to a scandal that has raised questions
nationally about the wisdom of what some see as the country’s
preoccupation with standardized testing.

Locally, the drama set
off a wave of changes in the 50,000-student school system, as well as
broader soul-searching in a majority-black city where teachers have
historically been a linchpin of the middle class.

For some, the
images of the educators, dressed as if for an awards assembly, being led
out of a Fulton County courtroom in handcuffs after the verdict were a
welcome if bitter end to an embarrassing civic catastrophe. Mayor Kasim
Reed spoke of the closing of “one of the darkest periods in the life of
our city,” and said that Atlanta could now “move forward with the
education and development of our young people.”

Others have been
appalled at what they described as unduly harsh treatment for the 10
educators, all of whom have awaited their sentencing in county jail.
Some have denounced their treatment as racism. The Rev. Bernice King,
daughter of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., is among those who have
called for leniency.

“While I agree that conspiring to change
test scores is unethical and our laws clearly express that it is a
crime, I don’t believe that 15-to-25-year prison sentences align with
the crimes that were committed by the ‘APS 11,’ ” Ms. King said in a
statement. “There are people who have committed far more egregious
offenses that have severely harmed humanity who have not served such
lengthy prison sentences.”

LEBANON,
Tenn. — The last time Kenneth Seay lost his job, at an industrial
bakery that offered health insurance and Christmas bonuses, it was
because he had been thrown in jail for legal issues stemming from a
revoked driver’s license. Same with the three jobs before that.

In
fact, Mr. Seay said, when it comes to gainful employment, it is not his
criminal record that is holding him back — he did time for dealing
drugs — it is the $4,509.22 in fines, court costs and reinstatement fees
he must pay to recover his license.

Mr. Seay’s inability to pay
those costs has trapped him in a cycle that thousands of other
low-income Tennesseans are struggling to escape. Going through the legal
system, even for people charged with nonviolent misdemeanors, can be
expensive, with fines, litigation taxes, probation fees and other costs
running into hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars. Many people
cannot pay.

As a result, some states have begun suspending
drivers’ licenses for unsatisfied debts stemming from any criminal case,
from misdemeanors like marijuana possession to felonies in which court
costs can reach into the tens of thousands of dollars. In Tennessee,
almost 90,000 driver’s licenses have been suspended since their law was
enacted in 2011.

Tennessee’s law has become part of a broader
debate over criminal justice debt, a national issue since a Department
of Justice report faulted Ferguson, Mo., for a law enforcement system
that focused aggressively on raising revenue and jailing people who
could not pay.

Many drivers who have lost their licenses in
Tennessee, too poor to pay what they owe and living in places with
limited public transportation, have done what Mr. Seay did. They have
driven anyway, resulting in courts so clogged with “driving while
suspended” cases that some judges dispatch them 10 at a time.

Each
time Mr. Seay got caught, he racked up new fines and fees on top of
old. As a repeat offender, he would often be jailed, causing him to lose
his job, and placed on probation, which carries an additional fee of
$40 a month. More recently, he has been jailed for violating probation
because he fell behind on those payments. Except for odd jobs, he has
been unemployed for about a year, partly because he finally swore off
driving.

“If I could get my license back that would be the most wonderful thing that happened to me in my life,” Mr. Seay, 44, said.

Tennessee is not alone in the practice: Five of the 15 states with the largest prison populations do so, according to Alicia Bannon
at the Brennan Center for Justice. Most states also suspend licenses
for failure to pay traffic fines, another policy that critics say
creates a quicksand of debt. The American Association of Motor Vehicle
Administrators has complained that suspension should be reserved for
dangerous drivers, not indebted ones.

But in recent years, a few
states have reconsidered the policy amid concerns that it hurts
low-income residents without achieving its intended goals. In 2013,
Washington stopped suspending licenses for failure to pay nonmoving
violations like expired registrations. Suspensions dropped by half, said
Brad Benfield, a spokesman for the Washington State Department of
Licensing, and each month, there have been 500 fewer arrests for driving
while suspended, saving an estimated 4,500 hours of patrol officers’
time.

And this month, a California lawmaker introduced a bill that would make it easier for people to reinstate their licenses, after a report said that four million California licenses had been suspended for failure to pay or failure to appear in court.

“For
many families, a driver’s license suspension is the beginning of a
descent into abject poverty for which there is no escape,” the proposed law says.

In
Tennessee, court clerks already had the power to pursue unpaid court
debts by garnishing wages or turning the cases over to a collection
agency. The new law was intended to give them extra leverage. Now, even
some of those clerks say they have mixed feelings about the policy.

“Though
it does give us some kind of teeth to be able to go after people who
don’t pay their court costs,” said Howard Gentry, the Davidson County
Criminal Court clerk in Nashville, “it also has some collateral damage
to it for those who are unable to pay.”

Typical court costs can
vary widely. Asked for an average, a lawyer at the public defender’s
office in Nashville picked up some files from her desk and read off the
outstanding debts: $598; $1,100; $5,600; $14,872; and $3,800. That does
not include a separate license reinstatement fee of $65 per offense. In
Mr. Seay’s case, the reinstatement fee alone is $1,822.

Many
defendants are forced to choose between paying court debt or essentials
like utility bills and child support. Mr. Seay said his tax refund this
year went toward child support debt accumulated during his time in
prison and periods of unemployment. For even low-level offenders, debt
can make a valid license unattainable.

Stephanie Newhouse, a
divorced mother of two in Pulaski, Tenn., had her license suspended for a
time after a drunken-driving conviction in Georgia. She said that the
suspension was fair punishment, but that having to pay hundreds of
dollars to reinstate the license was not. Ms. Newhouse has been able to
work only part time since the suspension because her hours are
contingent on when she can get a ride to work at an insurance office two
counties away.

“You really have to have a full-time, really good job to be able to pay it back,” she said.

Though
the law was projected to raise more than $20 million a year, it has not
come close, according to state agencies. Revenue from litigation taxes,
the primary court fee collected by the state, has remained flat, and
even declined a bit in 2014, and license reinstatement fees have
increased far less than was anticipated.

But since suspensions
under the law began in mid-2012, almost 90,000 licenses have been
suspended. Over the same period, 170,000 Tennessee licenses were
suspended for unpaid traffic tickets. In both categories, more than 40
percent of the suspended drivers were black, compared with 16 percent of
state residents.

Still, State Senator Jack Johnson, one of the
sponsors of the 2011 law, said it was needed to rein in shirkers. “It’s
usually not a tremendous amount of money, it’s just that folks are just
blowing it off,” he said.

Mr. Johnson, a Republican from
Williamson County, just south of Nashville, pointed out that the law
gives people a year to pay and that it allows people to petition for a
hardship license to get to work — a provision that some court officials,
public defenders and even one judge said they were unfamiliar with.

“Not
a single person has approached me about changing this,” Mr. Johnson
said. “Every one of these people ending up with these court fines and
fees and expenses, it’s as a result of violating the law in some
capacity.”

In Nashville, Cathie Sweat, 21, said she went to apply
for a license so she could work as a home health care aide, and learned
that it had already been suspended , for unpaid fines relating to a
minor drug charge and driving without a license. “How do you suspend a
person’s license that they never had?” she asked.

The burden of
criminal justice debt often falls on family members. Mr. Seay’s wife,
Terrica, uses her income from a $12.50-an-hour factory job to pay all
the household bills and has provided money time and again to bail her
husband out of jail, pay his probation fees and contribute toward the
backlog of fines. Asked how much this had added up to, Ms. Seay choked
back tears.

“I’m just crying all day at work,” she said, adding
that she had recently smoked marijuana to relieve the stress and
promptly failed a drug test at work and had to attend counseling. “I got
a good job, and I don’t have no money.”

In Tennessee, judges
have the discretion to waive court fees and fines for indigent
defendants, but they do not have to, and some routinely refuse. Judges
also have wide discretion over how much time to allow defendants to pay
traffic tickets before suspending a license. The new law on criminal
court debt allows defendants one year to keep their license as long as
they stay current on a payment plan approved by a judge.

Nashville
has also set up an “indigency docket” where the court debt of poor
defendants — at least, those who hear about the option — is routinely
waived. But they still have to pay a license reinstatement fee to the
Department of Safety, based on the number and type of violations.

Other
courts do not take the time to examine defendants’ ability to pay. At a
recent court session in Robertson County, north of Nashville, Erin
McKissick, who said she had been placed on probation, required to pay
for drug tests and threatened with losing her children after being
convicted of driving while suspended and other counts, filled out an
affidavit of indigency, saying she had a part-time cashier job and
received $200 a month in food stamps. When Judge Joel W. Perry of
General Sessions Court declined to look at it, she crumpled it into a
ball.

Even when people finally manage to get their license back,
their ordeal may not be over. James Goodwin, whose blended family
includes six young children, failed years ago to pay a $35 traffic fine
and then was repeatedly caught driving while suspended. After thousands
of dollars and seven months in jail, he said, last month he was able to
show a judge his new license. The judge dismissed his latest charge of
driving while suspended, but assessed him $275 in court costs.

Mr. Goodwin was given 30 days to pay.

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

4) Volunteer for Sheriff Is Charged in Killing After Mistaking Handgun for Taser

Prosecutors
in Tulsa, Okla., on Monday filed homicide charges against a 73-year-old
Sheriff’s Department volunteer who fatally shot a suspect on April 2,
apparently firing his handgun instead of a Taser by accident as other
officers were subduing the man on the ground.

The volunteer,
Robert C. Bates, was charged with second-degree manslaughter involving
culpable negligence, punishable by up to four years in prison.

Mr.
Bates, an insurance broker, had been a reserve deputy since 2008. He is
among scores of civilian police enthusiasts, including wealthy donors
to law enforcement, some of whom effectively act as an armed adjunct to
the Tulsa County Sheriff’s Department.

Sheriff’s officials said he had intended to subdue the fleeing suspect, Eric C. Harris, with a Taser, but mistakenly fired his handgun instead. Mr. Harris was accused of trying to sell an illegal gun to an undercover officer.Video shot by
a body camera worn by another deputy showed the suspect being knocked
to the ground and commanded to roll on his stomach as officers struggled
for a few seconds to subdue him. A voice on the video could be heard
saying “Taser, Taser,” as if to warn other deputies to get out of the
way of the device.

A moment later, there was a single gunshot, and a voice saying, “Oh, I shot him. I’m sorry.”

Mr.
Harris, who is black, could be heard repeatedly shouting “He shot me,”
while a deputy knelt on the suspect’s head and others yelled at him to
stop struggling. The video showed Mr. Bates, who is white, dropping his
pistol. Officials later said he dropped it because he was unprepared for
the gun’s recoil, and called it added proof that the shooting was an
accident; a Taser has negligible recoil.

Mr. Bates’s lawyer,
Charles O. Brewster, said that his client would surrender to the
authorities on Tuesday morning and that he intends to plead not guilty.

“Anyone
that looked at the facts here would find that there was no crime
committed,” Mr. Brewster said. “It was a truly tragic incident.”

Mr. Brewster expressed disappointment with the district attorney’s decision to charge his client.

“I
think it’s kind of a response to the national fervor and media
concerning police shootings,” he said. “I think he just kind of
capitulated to that. This truly is an event that was unintended and what
I consider to be a justifiable homicide.”

Mr. Bates was working
with sworn officers in an undercover operation into illegal gun sales
run by the Sheriff’s Department’s violent crimes task force.

Mr.
Bates acted as an unpaid member of the department’s Reserve Deputy
Program, in which about 130 volunteers receive training and are deployed
part-time throughout the department. A Tulsa police officer for a year
in 1964-65, he had received hundreds of hours of advanced training and
“can do anything a full-time deputy can do,” The Tulsa World quoted a
Sheriff’s Department spokesman, Shannon Clark, as saying.

In 2012, the department named Mr. Bates Reserve Deputy of the Year.

Mr. Clark did not return telephone calls seeking comment.

Sheriff Stanley Glanz of Tulsa County told The World that Mr. Bates was an old friend “who made an error.”

Mr.
Bates was the chairman of Mr. Glanz’s 2012 re-election campaign and,
with a $2,500 contribution, was its biggest donor. In recent years he
also donated equipment to the sheriff’s office, including automobiles
and technical equipment, according to a list provided by the county
clerk to radio station KRMG.

"He made an error," Sheriff Glanz said, according to The World. "How many errors are made in an operating room every week?"

Sheriff
Glanz told The World that he had no plans to change the deputy reserve
program but that it would be looked at as part of the Sheriff
Department’s routine review of operations.

Mr. Brewster, the
lawyer for Mr. Bates, said his client was trying to do his duty as a
citizen and a reservist. Mr. Bates made a mistake that law enforcement
officers have made many times before, Mr. Brewster said, pointing to the
2009 shooting of Oscar Grant in Oakland, Calif., by a transit police
officer, who said that he had mistaken his sidearm for a Taser.
Prosecutors charged the transit officer, Johannes Mehserle, with murder,
but a jury found him guilty of involuntary manslaughter.

“When
you look at this man, his life’s work, he’s been nothing more than
giving, trusting, and just trying to do the right thing,” Mr. Brewster
said.

The
protest by tens of thousands of low-wage workers, students and
activists in more than 200 American cities on Wednesday is the most
striking effort to date in a two-and-a-half-year-old labor-backed
movement that is testing the ability of unions to succeed in an economy
populated by easily replaceable service sector workers.

Labor has
invested tens of millions of dollars in a campaign for a $15-an-hour
minimum wage that goes beyond traditional workplace organizing, taking
on a cause that has captured broad public support. But the movement is
up against a hostile business sector sheltered by a decades-old federal
labor law that makes it difficult for workers to directly confront the
wealthy corporations that dominate the fast-food and hospitality
industries.For political activists looking to the 2016 presidential
campaign and beyond, the wage fight is coming at a potentially pivotal
moment, the first concrete, large-scale challenge in decades to an
economic system they view as skewed toward the wealthy.“There is a huge
upswelling of anger around jobs in this economy that are low-wage jobs,”
said Jonathan Westin, director of New York Communities for Change,
a grass-roots organizing group that has played a key role in both the
Occupy Wall Street movement and the current fast-food workers’ campaign.
“This economy we’re living in now doesn’t work for people.”

The
protests began with morning rallies that attracted crowds in the
hundreds at McDonald’s franchises in Atlanta; Brooklyn; Chicago; Kansas
City, Mo.; Los Angeles; and Raleigh, N.C., along with other locations.

A
noon rally in front of a McDonald’s restaurant on Manhattan’s Upper
West Side attracted throngs of protesters, many of them carrying signs
that read “Why Poverty?” and “We See Greed.” They included fast-food
workers, laundry workers, carwash employees and sympathetic bystanders.

“America,
period, is unequal,” said Chasten Florence, 26, a construction worker
from Jamaica, Queens. “Once we accept that, we can change that."

McDonald’s
said in a statement: “We respect people’s right to peacefully protest,
and our restaurants remain open every day with the focus on providing an
exceptional experience for our customers,”

The campaign, staffed
in part by organizers from the Service Employees International Union,
orchestrated the country’s first-ever fast-food industry strike in
November 2012, when 200 New York City workers walked off their jobs. The
periodic protests expanded to six other cities in the spring of 2013,
60 cities in August of that year, 150 cities in May 2014, and 190 last
December.

The protests have coincided with an extraordinary shift
in the political consensus on the minimum wage. In the last two years,
Seattle has moved to gradually increase its minimum wage to $15 an hour,
from $9.32. Oakland, Calif., established a new minimum wage of $12.25,
while Chicago approved an increase to $13, from $8.25, over the next
four years. Alaska and Arkansas passed minimum wage increases by
referendum in 2014.

In 2013, President Obama endorsed raising the
federal minimum wage to $9, from $7.25 an hour, then increased that to
$10.10 by the fall of that year. Democrats in the Senate are now working
on a proposal to raise the national minimum wage to $12 by 2020.

“The
labor movement has been stuck,” said Janice R. Fine, an associate
professor of Labor Studies at Rutgers University. “They deserve a lot of
credit in deciding that, in a situation this bleak, you needed ‘climate
change’ ”— that is, a change in how the public views low-wage work —
“before you’d actually get an opportunity to organize again.”

Partly
in response to the political shift as well as competitive pressure from
tighter labor markets, several major employers of low-wage workers have
moved to raised their base pay in recent months. Walmart, Target and
McDonald’s have all announced plans to increase their minimum wage to or
near $10, though for McDonald’s it would apply only to the roughly 10
percent of its workers employed directly by the company, not by its
franchisees.

But business groups argue that a substantially
higher increase would force employers to reduce hiring, accelerate
automation and even threaten the basic economic model of some
industries.

For Mary Kay Henry, the president of S.E.I.U., the investment in the Fight for $15
campaign was initially controversial among her colleagues, many of whom
wondered why the union should spend millions of dollars on a campaign
that did not immediately net it dues-paying members.

But it was
the result of a calculation that the 20th-century model of organizing
workers was rapidly becoming obsolete for those in a growing sector
where employers considered it essentially costless to replace them. “We
can no longer change our lives, and our kids’ lives, without the support
of a broader movement of workers,” Ms. Henry said.

The origins
of the Fight for $15 campaign date back to early 2012, when organizers
from New York Communities for Change, which had built support for Occupy
Wall Street activists among more established progressive activists and
labor organizers, began canvassing low-income New Yorkers, many of them
employed in the fast-food industry.At the same time, public opinion was
shifting. According to the General Social Survey,
regarded by researchers as the gold standard in public opinion data,
the share of Americans who agreed that “inequality continues to exist
because it benefits the rich and powerful” spiked by more than 10 points
from 2010 to 2012, to over 60 percent.

“People know Walmart and
McDonald’s are doing pretty well, people at top,” said Leslie McCall, a
professor of sociology at Northwestern University, who has closely
analyzed the opinion data on inequality. “It was like: ‘Wait a minute.
We’re into the recovery, the unemployment rate is going down. But most
people aren’t doing well.’ ”

Even politically moderate voters
appear to believe that it is the responsibility of corporations to
mitigate the problem. In her own preliminary surveys, Professor McCall
found that, when asked to choose who should be most responsible for
reducing inequality — the poor, the rich, the government, major
companies, or that it did not need to be reduced — a plurality of
Republican respondents, about 37 percent, chose “major companies.”

The
Fight for $15 campaign hopes to harness these sentiments in ways that
Occupy Wall Street never quite succeeded in doing. In Seattle, Steve
Gelb, who makes above minimum wage at a work force training outfit, said
he supported the protests because “the disparity of wealth has reached
alarming proportions and the salaries of business owners and executives
are way out of proportion.”

But the odds are still long on
whether fast-food workers can formally organize in significant numbers,
and push employers to raise wages to their target. Because most are
employed by thousands of independent franchisees, rather than
corporations like McDonald’s, the coordination challenge is enormous.

For
this reason, the minimum wage protests remain only a small piece of a
broader strategy intent on dragging McDonald’s to the bargaining table.
The S.E.I.U. and other labor groups have tried to spur a tax-avoidance
investigation against McDonald’s in Europe. An S.E.I.U.-affiliated
investment fund has campaigned against insider corporate directors in
McDonald’s Japan.

Most prominently, the groups have helped to
bring a complaint, currently being litigated before a National Labor
Relations Board judge, challenging the franchise model that allows
McDonald’s to disclaim “joint employer” status for most of the workers
at its restaurants.

“To the extent we worry about this, that’s
the worry here, the policy change brewing in the background,” said Glenn
Spencer of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “It would change the terms of
the franchise model, make it not viable.”

Mr. Spencer said the
model extended well beyond the fast-food industry — to hotels, rental
cars, auto maintenance and even tax preparation services — and described
the protests as “the P.R. wing of this attempt to get policy changed.”

C. J. Hughes contributed reporting from New York, Ronnie Cohen from San Francisco and Julie Weed from Seattle.

NORTH
CHARLESTON, S.C. — In a departure from the way most cases are handled,
the chief justice of the Supreme Court of South Carolina on Tuesday
appointed a judge from outside North Charleston to oversee the case
against the former police officer, Michael T. Slager, who has been
charged with murder in the shooting of Walter L. Scott, an unarmed man
who fled after being pulled over for a traffic stop on April 4.

Chief
Justice Jean Hoefer Toal ordered Judge Clifton B. Newman of South
Carolina Circuit Court on Tuesday to preside over all legal matters in
the case and to retain jurisdiction “regardless of where he may be
assigned to hold court.” Judge Newman, a former prosecutor based in
Kingstree, about 75 miles north of Charleston, is one of only five
African-American Circuit Court judges in the state.A clerk for the
Supreme Court said in a statement that “when a matter is complex or is
otherwise in need of management from beginning to end by one judge, the
chief justice routinely issues an administrative order making such an
assignment.” Trial judges typically rotate in the state, making it rare
for a single judge to preside over the duration of a case.

Charleston
County’s chief prosecutor, Scarlett A. Wilson, seemed to be taken aback
by the move, saying in a statement that she was “unaware this was in
the works.” Mr. Slager’s lawyer, Andy Savage, welcomed the order. “Judge
Newman enjoys an excellent reputation as a jurist, and we look forward
to working under his guidance,” Mr. Savage said in a statement, calling
it a “long-overdue decision.”

Pete Strom, a former United States
attorney in South Carolina, said the order reflected a desire to assure
both law enforcement and African-Americans that an experienced hand
would be steering the case. “This is important for all of us that our
system look right,” he said.

Also on Wednesday, a State Senate
subcommittee passed a bill requiring all law enforcement officers in the
state to wear body cameras.

The new developments played out
after the passenger in Mr. Scott’s car, through his lawyer, made his
first comments on the case. The passenger, Pierre Fulton, reported that
he heard the crackle of a Taser and a series of gunshots but did not see the encounter, his lawyer, Mark Peper, said Wednesday morning.

Mr.
Peper said that Mr. Fulton did not know why Mr. Scott ran from his car
after Mr. Slager pulled them over for a broken taillight. Mr. Fulton sat
calmly in the car after losing sight of Mr. Scott because he had no
reason to think his friend was in danger, Mr. Peper said.

“The
best explanation for that is because they weren’t doing anything wrong,
and there is nothing to indicate this is anything but a routine traffic
stop,” Mr. Peper said.

Mr. Scott picked Mr. Fulton up at his home
on the morning of April 4 before the two went to Hardee’s for
breakfast, Mr. Peper said. Then they drove to Faith Assembly Church,
where they each got a bag of food from a food bank. They dropped off Mr.
Fulton’s bag at his home and were continuing to Mr. Scott’s house,
where they planned to have a cookout that afternoon.

Mr. Peper said neither man was impaired in any way when Mr. Slager pulled them over.

“Pierre was just sitting there thinking, ‘He’ll just give us a ticket,’ ” Mr. Peper said. “Then all of a sudden, Walter bolts.”

On
Friday, in a meeting with officials from the South Carolina law
enforcement division, Mr. Fulton gave no indication that he had heard
signs of a scuffle between Mr. Scott and Mr. Slager before the shooting,
Mr. Peper said, though investigators did not ask Mr. Fulton
specifically about that.

Mr. Slager reported on his radio moments after the struggle that Mr. Scott had taken his Taser.

On
Thursday, members of Black Lives Matter Charleston plan to present a
list of 10 proposed changes to members of the North Charleston City
Council. Kwadjo Campbell, a former Charleston city councilman who is
working with the group, said the changes would include “calling for a
police chief that is more sensitive to community needs” and
strengthening independent oversight of the police department.

Kenny,
a high school senior in Weston, Fla., likes to puff e-cigarettes during
study sessions with friends after school. James, a senior in Fauquier
County, Va., uses them outside at lunch with friends who do smoke
tricks. Joe, a senior in Jackson, Miss., uses them in the morning before
class as a coffee-flavored way to pass the time.

E-cigarettes have arrived in the life of the American teenager.

Use
of the devices among middle- and high school students tripled from 2013
to 2014, according to federal data released on Thursday, bringing the
share of high school students who use them to 13 percent — more than
smoke traditional cigarettes.About a quarter of all high school students
and 8 percent of middle school students — 4.6 million young people
altogether — used tobacco in some form last year. The sharp rise of
e-cigarettes, together with a substantial increase in the use of hookah
pipes, led to 400,000 additional young people using a tobacco product in
2014, the first increase in years, though researchers pointed out the
percentage of the rise fell within the report’s margin of error.

But
the report also told another story. From 2011 to 2014, the share of
high school students who smoked traditional cigarettes declined
substantially, to 9 percent from 16 percent, and use of cigars and pipes
ebbed too. The shift suggested that some teenage smokers may be using
e-cigarettes to quit.

Smoking is still the single-biggest cause
of preventable death in the United States, killing more than 480,000
Americans a year, and most scientists agree that e-cigarettes, which
deliver the nicotine but not the dangerous tar and other chemicals, are likely to be far less harmful than traditional cigarettes.

The numbers came as a surprise and seemed to put policy makers into uncharted territory. The Food and Drug Administration
took its first tentative step toward regulating e-cigarettes last year,
but the process is slow, and many experts worry that habits are forming
far faster than rules are being written. Because e-cigarettes are so
new, scientists are still gathering evidence on their long-term health
effects, leaving regulators scrambling to gather data.

In
interviews, teenagers said that e-cigarettes had become almost as common
at school as laptops, a change from several years ago, when few had
seen them.

“It’s the healthy alternative taking over my school,”
said Tom, a 15-year-old sophomore at a school in Westchester County,
N.Y., who started vaping — the term for puffing on an e-cigarette — to
kick a smoking habit. He said about 70 percent of his friends now vaped.
But opinions were mixed on why the devices had caught on. A significant
share said they were using the devices to quit smoking
cigarettes or marijuana, while others said they had never smoked but
liked being part of the trend and enjoyed the taste. Two favorite
flavors of teenagers interviewed were Sweet Tart and Unicorn Puke, which
one student described as “every flavor Skittle compressed into one.”

Joe Stevonson, 18, a senior at a high school in Jackson, Miss., said he used e-cigarettes to quit smoking,
after the habit started affecting his ability to play sports. He
prefers a flavor called Courtroom, endorsed by the rapper Lil Ugly Mane,
which is described on websites where it is sold as “a medley of things
you might want while waiting for the jury to convict.”

As for
whether he still craved cigarettes, “the only thing that’s really
missing is feeling like your entire mouth is coated in dirt,” he said.
“I’ve seen a lot of people who don’t smoke pick them up because it looks
cool. But for every person I’ve met like that, I’ve met another using
it like it’s a medicine against cigarettes.”

James, 17, the
senior in Virginia, said he and his friends started using e-cigarettes
when he was 13, after his father abandoned the devices in a failed
effort to quit smoking.

“It was something for us to do that was
edgy and exciting,” said James, who asked that his last name not be used
because he did not want his smoking habits to be on public display. He
liked the smoke tricks that his friends had become good at, like blowing
out the vapor so that it spun like a tornado. His favorite flavor is
called Hawk Sauce, which he described as “a berry menthol kind of thing.”

He
has never smoked cigarettes and said he could not imagine ever
starting. “There’s a harshness to cigarettes,” he said. “Girls think
they’re gross.”

E-cigarette use had grown exponentially in
previous years, but from such a low base that the numbers had been
relatively small. But last year’s rise, which was captured in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s annual youth tobacco survey
of about 20,000 schoolchildren, lifted e-cigarette use above that of
traditional cigarettes, prompting an outcry from anti-tobacco advocates.
They warned that e-cigarettes were undoing years of progress among the
country’s most vulnerable citizens by making the act of puffing on a
tobacco product normal again, and by introducing nicotine, an addictive substance, to a broad population of teenagers.

“This
is a really bad thing,” said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the director of the
C.D.C., who noted that research had found that nicotine harms the
developing brain. “This is another generation being hooked by the
tobacco industry. It makes me angry.”

But the numbers had a
bright side. The decline in cigarette use among teenagers accelerated
substantially from 2013 to 2014, dropping by 25 percent, the fastest
pace in years.

The pattern seemed to go against the dire
predictions of anti-tobacco advocates that e-cigarettes would become a
gateway to cigarettes among youths, and suggested they might actually be
helping, not hurting. The pattern resembled those in Sweden and Norway,
where a rise in the use of snus, a smokeless tobacco product, was followed by a sharp decline in cigarette use.

“They’re
not a gateway in, and they might be accelerating the gateway out,” said
David B. Abrams, executive director of the Schroeder Institute for
Tobacco Research and Policy Studies, an anti-tobacco group.

Some teenagers described vaping as an entirely different culture from cigarette smoking,
and scoffed at the idea that it could be a way into cigarettes. Kenny,
the senior from Florida, said students liked the mix-and-match
accessories that a user could “personalize and call your own.”

“E-cigarettes
appeal less towards the stereotypical longhaired stoners, and more
towards sweatshirt-blue-jeans Silicon Valley programmer,” said Kenny,
who asked that his last name not be published to keep his vaping habits
private. “You can compare them to Apple computers.”

Selling e-cigarettes to minors is banned in many states, and the rule the F.D.A. proposed last year would ban it nationally.

But
the proliferation of vape shops and equipment for sale online has made
access easy, and some teenagers said they simply clicked a button to
indicate they were over 18 to be able to order a starter kit.
(E-cigarette equipment includes batteries that can be shaped like
cigarettes or a cellphone; liquid reservoirs, known as tanks;
cartridges; and battery chargers.)

Ethan deLehman, 17, a junior
at a private school in Pennsylvania, said he used to ask seniors who
were 18 to buy him e-cigarettes at convenience stores, but now he has
equipment and buys his liquids on the Internet.

“You can just go
online and click yes,” he said. He has used e-cigarettes to quit
smoking, a habit he picked up to relieve the pressure over getting into
college. His favorite flavors are Caramel Tobacco and Creamsicle.

A
starter e-cigarette kit can begin around $40 and go up to $200 or more,
with the fluid costing from $7 to $20 a bottle. That can be less
expensive than smoking over the long run, particularly in states like
New York where the cost of a pack of cigarettes is high, young people
said. Alexander Wilson started smoking cigarettes when he was 15. He
said that e-cigarettes helped him cut down and save money. “It’s cheaper
over all for how much I smoke,” said Mr. Wilson, who lives in
Frederick, Md.

He recalled seeing one of the e-cigarette devices
for the first time. “I was like, ‘Dude, why do you have a light saber?’ ”
he said. “And he was like, ‘No, that’s my e-cigarette.’ ”

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

8) Chicago Pays $5 Million to Family of Black Teenager Killed by Officer

CHICAGO
— The City Council here agreed on Wednesday to pay $5 million to the
family of a black teenager who was fatally shot by a Chicago police
officer last fall, as federal and state prosecutors acknowledged that
they were conducting a criminal investigation into the shooting.

The
council’s decision came swiftly and with no debate, even before a suit
had been filed in the case by the family of Laquan McDonald, 17, who the
police say was wielding a three-inch knife when an officer shot him 16
times on Oct. 20 on the city’s Southwest Side. The authorities say a
dashboard camera on a police squad car captured the confrontation,
though the recording has not been made public.

Chicago’s
settlement in the case came amid increased scrutiny of police shootings
around the nation, as well as a flurry of new attention to police
conduct in this city, recent and past.

In a prosecution that
officials described as rare for fatal police shootings here, a Chicago
police officer is on trial for involuntary manslaughter, among other
charges, in the death of a woman near a park in March 2012. The officer,
Detective Dante Servin, who was off duty, shot recklessly into a group
of people in a darkened alley, killing Rekia Boyd, prosecutors say. But
lawyers for Detective Servin have said he believed he saw someone in the
group pulling out an item that looked like a weapon.

Separately,
the City Council this week began considering a $5.5 million reparations
package for scores of victims of abuse and torture by the police here
in the 1970s and ’80s under the watch of a notorious police commander, Jon Burge. Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced his support this week for the long-sought reparations,
which would include a memorial and a formal apology for the mostly
black South Siders who have described being shocked with cattle prods,
beaten with phone books and suffocated with plastic bags to compel
confessions.

The cases involving Mr. Burge and a group of officers under his command had haunted Chicago and its Police Department for years.

Since
Mr. Burge was fired from the department in 1993, the city has paid out
some $85 million in settlements and other costs. Over the years, some of
those abused by Mr. Burge and his so-called midnight crew have been
cleared and sent home, but efforts are still underway for reviews of the
cases of about 20 people who remain in prison.

“This has been a
long time coming,” said Darrell Cannon, 64, who served more than 24
years in prison for murder after a confession in 1983 that he says was
coerced by officers who broke his front teeth when they shoved a gun
barrel into his mouth. While he was incarcerated, Mr. Cannon said, he
settled a lawsuit claiming torture for $3,000, far less than some.

“For
the first time, this city is recognizing that black people have been
tortured and hurt at the hands of police, and we can take the gains and
build on that,” he said. “We’ve been fighting for this for years now.”

Provisions
of the reparations plan include free tuition at city colleges;
psychological counseling and job training for those abused, as well as
their families; financial reparations for those with credible claims of
torture; and education about what happened in the Burge cases for
Chicago Public School students in eighth and 10th grade. Mr. Emanuel
this week described Mr. Burge’s actions as a disgrace, adding, “We stand
together as a city to try and right those wrongs and to bring this dark
chapter of Chicago’s history to a close.”

After a four-year
inquiry, special prosecutors said in 2010 that their investigation had
corroborated the abuse claims. Mr. Burge was never directly charged with
abuse because of statutes of limitation, but he was convicted in 2010
of perjury and obstruction of justice in connection with the events. He
completed his prison sentence this year and receives a pension of $4,000
a month, officials said.

Little has been made public about the
shooting of Mr. McDonald last fall. The name and race of the police
officer involved, for instance, have not been released; city officials
say a union contract bars them from naming the officer at this point.
(The officer has been placed on paid desk duty pending the outcome of
the investigations.)

A video recording from the scene has also
not been released because, city officials said, it is part of a criminal
investigation by the F.B.I. and by the offices of the United States
attorney and the Cook County state’s attorney.

From mid-2007
until the end of last year, city records show, Chicago police officers
shot some 385 people. Of those, 122, including Mr. McDonald, died.

City
officials say the police were answering a 911 call about a man with a
knife trying to break into vehicles in a trucking yard when they came
upon Mr. McDonald on Oct. 20. He refused to drop the knife, the
authorities say, and began walking or jogging away.

A pair of police officers followed him, one on foot and the other in a car, and called for backup from an officer with a Taserstun gun.

At
one point, Mr. McDonald pounded on the windshield of the squad car and
punctured its front tires with the knife, city officials say, as more
officers arrived. In the end, six officers were present when one of them
fired a weapon at him, striking him 16 times.

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

9) A Police Shot to a Boy’s Back in Queens, Echoing Since 1973
By JIM DWYER

It
was 1973, long before anyone could imagine hashtag declarations of
solidarity and protest, the kind of message to the world that today
might read, #IamCliffordGloverInTheFourthGrade.

No one could pull
out a phone to make a video of Clifford Glover, a 10-year-old running
from a plainclothes police officer with a gun who had just jumped out of
a white Buick Skylark in Jamaica, Queens, on a spring morning in 1973.

“I
am sure a camera would have helped, but the ballistics were clear,”
Albert Gaudelli, a former Queens prosecutor, said this week. “The bullet
entered his lower back and came out at the top of his chest. He was
shot T-square in the back, with his body leaning forward. He was running
away.”That bullet killed Clifford Glover.
Its trajectory — through a family, a neighborhood, a generation — can
be traced to this day, in injuries that never healed, in a story with no
final word. When a black man named Walter Scott was shot by a white
police officer in North Charleston, S.C., on April 4, a cellphone video
made by a passer-by showed that Mr. Scott was also running away when he
was killed and that he was not, as the officer claimed, carrying a
police Taser.

“With all this killing and stuff,” said Pauline Armstead, a sister of the dead boy, “they need to go back to Cliffie Glover.”

Clifford,
a black boy, had been shot by Officer Thomas Shea, a white man, who
said he had tried to question him and his stepfather because they fit
the descriptions of cab robbers. They ran. The officer said he fired
when Clifford, in flight, pointed a gun at him, which the mortally
injured boy had then managed to toss or hand to his stepfather.

In
the hours and days that followed the shooting, armies of investigators
scoured the streets and sewers, pored over court records and arrived,
without warrants, to search the homes of Clifford’s family and
relatives.

“Guys were trying to help Shea, and coming up with all
kinds of stuff,” said Mr. Gaudelli, who was the chief homicide
prosecutor in Queens at the time. “Someone showed up with a starter’s
pistol, but as soon as you pressed them on it, they folded. There was no
gun.”

People in Jamaica rose in protest; the streets were
blocked with heavy construction equipment owned by a black contractor.
Mr. Shea became the first police officer in nearly 50 years to be
charged with committing murder while on duty.

“Shea says that the
kid turned and appeared to have a gun,” Mr. Gaudelli said. “That’s what
got him indicted: The ballistics made Shea a liar.”

But not, apparently, a murderer, at least in the eyes of the jury of 11 white men and one black woman who found him not guilty.
Afterward, many of the jurors joined Mr. Shea and his lawyers at a
Queens Boulevard restaurant to celebrate. They told reporters it was
possible Mr. Shea had been telling the truth about seeing a gun.That
same day, word of the verdict reached a baseball field on the grounds of
the South Jamaica Houses, known locally as the 40 Projects. Eric Adams,
who was then a 13-year-old from the neighborhood, was waiting to bat.

“We
were playing a Long Island team that happened to be all white,” said
Mr. Adams, who became a police officer and is now the Brooklyn borough
president. “When the news came out, about 200 people emerged on the
field. They just took the baseball bats and started beating the white
players, chanting, ‘Shea got away.’ ”

Later, Mr. Shea would be
fired despite a rally by police officers and the pleas of his lawyer,
Jacob Evseroff, who said his client was needed on the force “to protect
us from the animals who roam the streets of New York.”

The Long
Island baseball team had come to Queens as part of “an interracial,
inter-neighborhood thing,” Mr. Adams said. “It was their first visit.”
The Jamaica team tried to stop the assault but could not. “That was all
the outrage,” he said, adding that “because of what happened, a lot of
our guys quit the team, never played baseball again.”

For his generation of black boys and girls, Mr. Adams said, the verdict “brought a lot of despair.”

The year after Clifford Glover died, the number of shots fired by officers declined by nearly half. (In 2013, the number of shots fired was 248, the fewest since the Police Department began keeping detailed records in 1971; at the peak, in 1972, officers fired 2,510 bullets.)

Because
Mr. Shea had spoken freely with his superiors, the largest police union
began a campaign urging its members not to talk after a shooting until a
union lawyer had arrived.

For Clifford’s family, his death changed everything.

“They
wrote that we were poor,” Darlene Armstead, a younger sister, said this
week. As she and three other siblings, Kenneth, Pauline and Patricia
Armstead, described the household this week, the family may not have had
much money, but before Clifford’s killing, it was sound.

Darlene’s father, Add Armstead, who was Clifford’s stepfather, went to work every morning at a junkyard.

The
family had dinner each night at the same time, around one table, Ms.
Armstead said, then watched cowboy shows on television. On summer
weekends, neighborhood children feasted in the backyard on watermelon
laid out on a door, covered by a sheet, that rested on two clean garbage
cans. Add Armstead and his brothers enjoyed cigars and burgers.

“My father taught us structure,” Darlene Armstead said.

She
had to make beds. One brother had to clean the yard and bring out the
garbage. Clifford, a fourth grader at Public School 40, went with his
stepfather on weekends to the junkyard, carrying his own little wrench.

On
the morning of April 28, 1973, a Saturday, Add Armstead woke Clifford
before dawn so they could be at the yard to move cranes into place for a
delivery. They walked a few blocks along New York Boulevard — known
today as Guy R. Brewer Boulevard — when an unmarked car pulled alongside
them. Mr. Armstead, carrying wages that he had been paid the day
before, said he and Clifford ran, afraid that they were going to be
robbed. Hearing shots, he flagged down a patrol car, not realizing that
Clifford had been felled.

Mr. Shea testified that he did not
realize that Clifford, who stood just five feet tall and weighed less
than 100 pounds, was a child. After the shooting, prosecutors said, Mr.
Shea’s partner, Walter Scott, was recorded on a radio transmission
saying, “Die, you little,” adding an expletive. Mr. Scott — who by
coincidence has the same name as the man killed in North Charleston —
denied it was his voice.

Clifford’s death sent his mother, Eloise Glover, into a tailspin.

“My
mother turned on my father — ‘Did you have a gun, they said you had a
gun,’ ” Darlene Armstead said. “It caused them to break up. My mother
lost her mind.”

The family received a settlement from New York
City that, in the memory of the children, came to about $50,000, most of
which the mother lent to local churches but never got back.

“My mother didn’t want no one to know when she going outside,” Ms. Armstead said. “She always used the back door.”

Ms.
Armstead recalled sleeping nights on chairs in hospital emergency rooms
while her mother was being treated, and living off restaurant handouts.
“She was going to pay this guy to board up the house and she would pay
him to bring the food to us,” she said.

The children went to
foster care and group homes. One brother was in a psychiatric
institution for about 10 years. Her mother, who had diabetes, died in
1990 at age 54.

Add Armstead died in 2005, at 83. “They put guns
on him; they said he had guns at work, at home,” Kenneth Armstead said.
“To demonize him would help Shea’s story.”

Mr. Shea, who moved
out of the state after his marriage broke up, could not be reached.
“I’ve lost it all,” he told the author Thomas Hauser, whose 1980 book,
“The Trial of Patrolman Thomas Shea,” is a comprehensive account of the
episode.

The defense lawyer, Mr. Evseroff, said a video would
have changed nothing. “The case was resolved as a result of a trial,” he
said.

For Mr. Adams, the quick termination of the South Carolina
police officer in the shooting this month of Walter Scott was a
positive step.

About one-third of the migrant construction workers employed at New York University’s
campus in Abu Dhabi — or about 10,000 people — were excluded from the
protections of the university’s labor guidelines ensuring fair wages,
hours and living conditions, according to an investigative report issued on Thursday.

The
72-page report said that some subcontractors were exempted from the
guidelines based on decisions made by local contractors running the
operation. One of those contractors was Mubadala, a real estate company
owned by the government of Abu Dhabi.

“This practice of exempting
companies from compliance created a significant gap in coverage that
disenfranchised thousands of workers from the protections contemplated
by the labor guidelines,” said the report, by the international
investigative firm Nardello & Company.The investigation was
requested by N.Y.U. and an Abu Dhabi government agency after reports, including an article
last May in The New York Times, were published saying that many of the
workers, most of them recruited from South Asia, had been charged steep
recruitment fees to get their jobs; that few were being paid what they
had been promised; and that some lived in miserable conditions, all in
contravention of standards N.Y.U. had established for the project. Those
guidelines were developed in response to concerns about the region’s
reputation for mistreatment of its imported work force.

In
statements made on Thursday, N.Y.U. said the report found that a
majority of the construction force had been treated in accordance with
the guidelines. But it said it was taken by surprise by the findings on
how many workers at the campus, which opened last year on Abu Dhabi’s
Saadiyat Island, had not been protected, and it added that it would
repay any shortchanged workers.

“That error, for which we take
full responsibility, was inconsistent with the project’s publicly stated
commitment to ensure that all of those working on the construction of
the N.Y.U.A.D. Saadiyat Campus would be covered by our standards and
compliance-monitoring program,” an N.Y.U. statement said.

The
university said that a third party would be hired to handle
reimbursement of the workers, but it was not immediately clear how much
money that would involve.

The report found that the exceptions to
the guidelines were initially designed to apply to a narrow group, such
as vendors delivering goods to the project. Mubadala and other
contractors later expanded the exceptions to include subcontractors
whose work fell below $1 million or who worked on-site for less than 31
days at a time, or with gaps of 30 days between visits, the report said.

Ultimately,
this provided a financial incentive for contractors to break
subcontracts into small amounts, eliminating extra costs for labor
compliance, the report said.

The report was somewhat ambiguous about exactly how much N.Y.U. knew about the exemptions.

The
report said that N.Y.U. did not know about the practice of granting
exemptions, but it also said that “accounts vary” as to the extent of
each party’s knowledge. Some N.Y.U. personnel interviewed said they were
aware of a “time threshold,” the report said, but not the monetary
threshold.

John Sexton, president of N.Y.U., said on Thursday
that neither the university nor its Abu Dhabi government partner was
aware of the exemption policy “or how widely it was being applied.”

The
Nardello report took issue with some details in the Times article,
specifically the genesis of a strike that led to the deportation of some
workers. The report said the strike was related mostly to conditions at
other projects in the area, where many hotels, businesses and cultural
institutions have been expanding, in some cases, like N.Y.U.’s, with the
financial backing of the oil-rich emirate.

But the report
corroborated many of the article’s key findings. Among them was that
hardly any of the workers had been reimbursed for fees, generally $1,000
to $3,000, that the workers had paid to recruitment agents in their
home countries. The report estimated that more than 25,000 workers would
have qualified for the reimbursement.

Only 20 workers were
reimbursed, partly because the N.Y.U. policy requiring reimbursement was
interpreted to apply only to workers hired specifically to work at the
N.Y.U. campus. But most workers were employed by contractors working on
several projects, and so were not limited to working on the N.Y.U. job.

The
report cited evidence that N.Y.U., after promising in 2011 that it
would reimburse recruitment fees even for workers who started on other
projects, later narrowed the reimbursement to those “specifically
recruited to our job site.” In addition, only those who could supply
proof of having paid recruitment fees would receive reimbursement.Daniel
Nardello, chief executive of Nardello & Company, said such proof
was virtually impossible because the recruiting agents are often dubious
characters. “It would be like getting a receipt from a loan shark,” he
said.

In an email on Thursday, an N.Y.U. spokesman, John Beckman,
said the university believed it had established reasonable
requirements. “We are disappointed with the gap between what we intended
and the outcome,” he said.

The investigation also found that 30
percent of workers said they had to give up their passports to employers
as a condition of working at the campus, a violation of the N.Y.U.
labor guidelines.

Claims of poor conditions for workers in the United Arab Emirates date back to a 2009 Human Rights Watch
report alleging mistreatment of many of the more than five million
low-paid migrant workers who had been employed in the country. Saadiyat
Island, a development project hosting the N.Y.U. campus and planned
branches of the Louvre and Guggenheim museums, had become a focal point
of those complaints.

A Gulf researcher for Human Rights Watch,
Nicholas McGeehan, said the Nardello report was well researched,
applauding N.Y.U. for its promise to compensate workers.

Both Mr.
McGeehan and the Coalition for Fair Labor at NYU, a faculty-student
group, called for restitution to about 200 workers deported as a result
of the strike.

Representatives of the United Arab Emirates and
its principality Abu Dhabi did not respond to emails seeking comment on
the report, which noted a fundamental difference between Western
attitudes toward workers’ rights and those in the emirates.

“It
is evident that U.A.E. law is completely inconsistent with labor
practices in the U.S. and elsewhere in the West,” the report said in a
footnote.

In March, the emirates banned travel
there by Andrew Ross, a professor at N.Y.U.’s New York campus, who had
been critical of labor conditions. Last year, a freelance writer who
collaborated on the Times article, Sean O’Driscoll, was also barred from the country.